Yesterday I commented on a NYT internal plan for its digital future because it said nothing about bringing users into the masthead. That, imho, has been the challenge for the news industry since the web became the primary way for people to get news. #

The new technology broadens the pipes to infinite size compared to what they were in the print era, yet the news organizations are all still structured as if the pipes hadn't changed much in size or shape.#

Why hasn't tech broken out of this? Possibly because they're just as scared of the future that does not include a controllable insider press, or what Jay Rosen calls the Church of the Savvy. The church rules in tech news just as it rules in politics. #

Would a political leader today really want reform of the press around the realities of the Internet? Would an installed tech leader? I guess it depends on how gutsy one is, and ambitious, and willing to break with the past.#

I was talking with a few VCs in the months before NewsGator got funded, about starting a company around RSS. Little did I know that while we were talking they were putting this new company together, around a guy who had written an Outlook plug-in that turned feeds into mailboxes. #

First I heard of NewsGator was in their press release. To me, it was a pretty empty feeling, to have put all this effort into RSS thinking there would be commercial opportunities, to be ready to start developing a real engineering team around the ideas, instead of the seat-of-the-pants approach you have to take when it's your own time and money. #

I guess there's some satisfaction that in the end it didn't work for them. I always wondered what the VCs were thinking. They had a chance to work with the guy who was driving adoption, who had the relationships with the publishers, and had a roadmap already worked out. Instead they went with a nice guy who thought RSS was email. #

Actually I don't really wonder what they were thinking, because I don't think they actually were thinking. #